Why is Java's type inference so weak?

Question

Say, I have a method:

public static  Collection addToCollection(T element, Collection collection) {
    collection.add(element);
          


        

Answer 1

The type inference system has been improved in Java 8, with the introduction of target typing, in order to give more expressivity to streams and lambdas. As a consequence your code compiles with Java 8.

More about it in the updated tutorial, with a very similar example towards the very bottom of the page.